Have Western RPGs supplanted JRPGs?

[shio]

Words Of Wisdom said:

badgenome said:

shio said:
Anyone that has seen my posts knows that I'm a WRPG nut and I think that JRPGs are vastly inferior. JRPGs are suffering from the lack of evolution. They are still developed with juvenile stories, archaic dialogue systems, shallow combat mechanics, etc... they need to change things.

I have always said that they needed to copy from WPRGs, but they could aso take elements from Adventure games, and that means:
- Have more mature and better written stories
- Implement a dialogue system directly into the story (even if it doesn't impact the story, it would still give the illusion of choice and more interactivity)
- Have more non-combat gameplay

I think it would do nicely, and it would still alow to keep a linear storytelling.

Agreed, for sure. They have yet to evolve much past the old Ultima games, in which I would amuse my eight-year-old self by telling Lord British "no" 1000000 times.

Actually this is one element that Persona 4 has that bothers me quite a bit.

I hate meaningless dialog choices.  You get a meaningless dialog choice, a single unique response from a character, and then the game goes back to the normal dialog path.  A lot of the time the dialog has no effect on anything and is just wasting my time.

Give me a game like Arcanum where my dialog choices actually meant something significant or at least got me more than a single line of dialog in response.

 

Blame the developers - having single choices on dialogues is just poor design. That is actually one of the things I hate most from Japanese Adventure games and Interactive novels: they often gave single choices or just stopped the story for pointless/uniteresting dialogue choices, often a consequence from poor writting.

Japanese developers should look at a few awesome games like Grim Fandango or Deus Ex, where the writing quality and dialogue systems makes the games shine.